Decoding Modern Healthcare with SaaS and Artificial Intelligence

Interview with Brian Wagner | Founder and CEO, Health Insights Consulting Group | Former commercial leader at GE HealthCare and Philips | Private equity advisor and board member

Published: August 4, 2025 · Statistics cited by the expert have been checked against public sources and updated or attributed where needed.

Six in ten U.S. adults live with at least one chronic disease, according to the CDC, and the system built to diagnose them is still centered on the hospital. Brian Wagner, who has spent more than 30 years in medtech, diagnostics and digital health, argues that home diagnostics, connected by SaaS platforms and sharpened by AI, will carry a growing share of that load. The hard part is not the technology. It is reimbursement, proof and scale.

Diagnostics Are Leaving the Hospital

"Post-COVID, there's a clear shift from facility-based diagnostics to patient-centric models that prioritize convenience, privacy and accessibility," Wagner says. Patients now expect testing at urgent care, retail clinics or at home.

He sees four drivers behind the shift:

• Decentralization of care
• The burden of chronic disease: according to the CDC, six in ten U.S. adults live with at least one chronic disease, and four in ten with two or more
• Provider shortages
• Unmet needs the current system does not serve

Wearables and apps enable earlier detection and remote monitoring. But gaps remain. "Despite the innovation, gaps remain in clinical validation, interoperability and patient trust." The data has to reach the electronic health record and turn into insight a clinician can act on.

SaaS Is the Nervous System

Modular platforms now connect wearables, telehealth and specialists in real time. "If you're dealing with cancer, you want your oncologist, radiologist and cardiologist all aligned," Wagner says. Fast information sharing helps patients get the right diagnosis and a treatment plan they can follow.

He points to Clario, a provider of clinical trial endpoint data and technology. Clario has stated that its technology supported a large majority of recent FDA novel drug approvals, around 70% according to the company. Wagner sees it as a key enabler of decentralized clinical trials.

Access is a major reason those trials matter. Participants in U.S. trials have long skewed toward White patients: in the FDA's 2020 Drug Trials Snapshots, about 75% of participants in trials supporting new drug approvals were White, 8% were Black and 11% were Hispanic. Women made up 56% of participants overall that year but remain underrepresented in some therapeutic areas, such as cardiovascular trials. Historically, many trials also drew mostly on patients living near major academic centers. "Through decentralized clinical trials technology, we can recruit you into the study, and we can monitor and measure and do everything remotely," Wagner explains.

Real-time monitoring also protects trial integrity. "We know in real time that this patient hasn't gotten out of bed for 12 hours." Teams can verify issues early and avoid false positives or negatives.

No Reimbursement, No Adoption

Wagner's go-to-market rule is to give each stakeholder what it values. "Clinicians want clinical utility. Payers want cost savings, and patients want ease of use."

Strong ROI is not enough if provider incentives point the other way. "If the provider isn't making money, or as much money as they would doing something else, that technology isn't going to be adopted." Aligning with reimbursement frameworks such as CPT codes is, in his view, an adoption strategy, not paperwork.

Training matters too. He favors virtual reality tools that let clinicians review procedures on demand. "The night before, they can go in and review a rotator cuff surgery."

Escape Pilot Purgatory

Many diagnostics startups test endlessly without scaling. "You want to avoid bespoke pilots. You want to build repeatable, interoperable solutions. Think sustainable and repeatable from day one."

Wagner's checklist:

• Define success up front. "What is the definition of success? What are we going to measure? What are we going to monitor?"
• Find an internal champion. "If you don't have a champion, you're dead in the water."
• Bring hard numbers. If a solution can cut the cost of a procedure in half without compromising care, the case makes itself. "You are going to have data that backs up any of those claims, not what you're saying, but what the data is saying."

Proof Beats Promotion

For home diagnostics to scale, Wagner recommends omnichannel marketing built on proof: physician testimonials, patient stories and clinical data, optimized for search, plus co-branding with hospitals and ready-to-use PR kits for partners. Generic outreach does not work. "If it's not targeted, if it's not segmented, if it's not personalized, forget that channel."

AI Moves Care Earlier

Wagner sees AI as the engine of modern diagnostics. "AI can flag deterioration before symptoms emerge. It's proactive care." In mammography screening, for example, AI can highlight areas of concern so radiologists focus their review and, in some settings, deliver same-day results. AI also brings together fragmented data from wearables, apps and health systems to help clinicians narrow down the most likely diagnoses.

What Makes a Diagnostics Startup Fundable

From his work as a private equity advisor and board member, Wagner looks for five things:

1. Clinical validation
2. Scalability
3. Reimbursement clarity. Without a clear path to reimbursement, investors see too much uncertainty, and even strong technologies stall.
4. Strong leadership. "People tend to invest in management, not so much the widget, believe it or not."
5. Defensible data. "Is there a defensible data moat or are there patents?" A startup without intellectual property or proprietary datasets is easy for larger or lower-cost competitors to copy, which limits its valuation and slows its path to exit.

Wagner's Takeaways for Executives

• In his view, home diagnostics have moved from peripheral to central in chronic care.
• He sees SaaS and AI as the connective tissue that lets care scale.
• Success, he argues, depends on clinical rigor, patient-centered design and go-to-market discipline, aligned with patients, providers and payers.

Brian Wagner is a healthcare executive with more than three decades of leadership across medtech, diagnostics, SaaS platforms and digital health. He has led commercial strategy at GE HealthCare and Philips and held a leadership role at Rubbermaid Healthcare. He is the Founder and CEO of Health Insights Consulting Group, Inc., and advises private equity firms as an advisor and board member.

Sources

• CDC, About Chronic Diseases
• U.S. FDA, 2020 Drug Trials Snapshots Summary Report
• Clario company information

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